search

John Kinsella

Epilogue

High forest and understoryconverge with the ruin of day,the collapsing narrative thread—traffic never far away—earshot merely a colloquial humas songbirds contract with scrub,the collation of gunblast beyondthe jurisdiction of the Wildlife Trust;etiquette of castigation in a pastoral voicebarely showing throughas Major Mitchell enters the interiorof Tropical Australia and quotes Ovid:"Communemque prius ceu lumina solis et aurasCautus humum longo signavit limite mensor"and steps up the veracityand range of the Voice,confirming enclosure,the haptic integration of sense organs,their turbulence acrossoiled waters of survey data,hydraulics of boundary machinesin the "Gothic hypothesis" of Outback—that sea for depressiveswho would die unsatisfiedif they actually found a reef of gold—"O soule be chang'd into little water dropsAnd fall into the Ocean, ne're be found."With the draining, the water Brethrenassembled against the drainersand Pastor Albrecht was heard to utterfrom deep within Centralia:"When we came herewe thought we had foundthe only people in the worldwithout religion. Nowwe have learntthat they are amongthe most religious peoplein the world" as yet againthe monks at Elyrefuse to toethe party line.

"It's what you don't have that counts!"yells the Capitalist, while you—wanting soule as the radio "blasts"and diminishing woods struggle to coppice—peruse missives from the last settlers,uncomfortable in their paradox,while sheep are trucked to marketand seed bins emptied,the sunset ashen and sentimentalityleft stranded on a dirt roadgoing nowhere. An echidnais crushed by a strangercoming to grips with the edgesof what is now his paddock—"All beasts are happy, for when they die,Their souls are soone dissolv'd in elements..."—it being neither here nor therethat the first badgerand hedgehog you seein this, your New Country,should lie dead upon the road—at night you might say "At leastthere aren't any kangaroosto worry about!" the impactpotentially fatal.